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Hilarious Photos of People Before and After Having Kids Captures the True Essence of Parenthood

If you have kids, they're basically the light of your life. They add so much happiness and excitement to everything, and it's hard to imagine a time before your world didn't revolve around them. But for as much joy as children add, they can be equally as draining. Mike Julianelle, dad of a 7-year-old and a nearly 2-year-old, recently posted a photo that all parents can relate to.

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"Wanna see something REALLY scary? Here’s me, before and after I had kids!" he wrote in a photo caption that shows one image of Julianelle in 2006, smiling and clean-shaven, next to an image of himself ten years later — a little heavier, no smile, and with a noticeable 5 o'clock shadow.

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Julianelle runs the Instagram account Got Toddlered, which posts photos and memes of things kids have ruined. After he posted the photo, a follower told him that she loved it and that he should ask for submissions from other parents, he told HuffPost. So far, he's posted dozens of parental transformations, all of which are hilariously on point.

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“I’ve gotten a lot more of these than I did of the typical ‘my toddler destroyed something’ memes I was previously receiving! Probably because taking a photo of something your kids destroyed is less of a priority than cleaning it up,” Julianelle told HuffPost. “And it’s much easier to clean a mess than it is to fix your own face!”

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Julianelle says he thinks the photos show how much of a toll kids can take on parents, but adds that the photos are not to be taken too seriously."Obviously, it’s meant to be lighthearted, and no one is seriously blaming their children for the state of their faces or lives, except for me when I seriously blame my kids for the state of my face and my life, which is basically all I do on my blog and Facebook page and Twitter," he told HuffPost.

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Julianelle hopes his blog makes people laugh, and wants parents to know that "it's OK to be honest about the pitfalls of parenthood." "There’s no shame in admitting that for all the peaks, there are plenty of pits," Julianelle said. "Kids are the worst best thing that’s ever happened to us, and if we don’t laugh about the havoc they wreak we’d have to cry instead, and I’m not a crier."

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We can probably all agree these posts capture parenthood pretty accurately! As these photos show, our kids can be handfuls, exhaust us, and drive us crazy, but would you really have it any other way?